Pizza and networking mark students’ participation in Tech Nights

13/6/2025

Pizza, artificial intelligence, networking and open data. The unusual combination guarantees the success of “IBM Tech Nights”. Last Tuesday (10), IMPA Tech students took part in an edition of the event that aims to bring together technical communities to debate themes from the Technological Atlas. At IBM’s headquarters in the center of Rio de Janeiro, participants talk about tools and technologies developed by the company in a relaxed atmosphere, such as AI, automation, digital security and hybrid cloud.

The event was announced by IMPA Tech professor Emílio Brazil, who is also a researcher at the technology multinational. At IBM, Emílio leads the “AI-assisted Decision Making” group, which researches AI applications for industry. For him, the “Tech Nights” are opportunities to learn about new applications of technology and learn more about open source, sharing experiences with other institutions in Rio de Janeiro. “The students participated very well, they attended the lectures and talked to the software engineers,” he said.

Despite the discussions being a little more advanced, the IMPA Tech students rated the experience as positive and inspiring. “Although I didn’t understand everything, because the debate involved topics that we haven’t seen in college, it was nice to take part to understand what our profession can be. I saw a lot of machine learning applications, which is a subject we’ll be taking next term,” said undergraduate student Isabelli Christini.

In this edition, the discussion was led by IBM researchers Max de Bayser and Mateus Devino, and Michal Goin, a member of the RedHat software company. The talks discussed open-source AI models and code collections that optimize the processing of language models. Subjects aimed at those wishing to explore and implement large language models in projects.

At the end of the event, the undergraduates took a tour of IBM’s facilities. “I really enjoyed it! It was very valuable, as a small sample of what I’ll be able to do after learning more about machine learning. IBM is a very beautiful place and I got to see a lot of things I hadn’t even imagined,” added Isabelli.

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